Bangalore: Skybox Security, a global player in cybersecurity operations, analytics and reporting (SOAR), ended 2016 with a 50 percent increase in sales and 43 percent rise in new customer acquisitions compared to 2015.

Amid this growing demand of SOAR solutions, there’s key challenges as well including a global cybersecurity skills shortage, compliance requirements for new regulations such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the need for greater visibility across increasingly large and complex IT environments

In 2016, Skybox also closed a sale worth more than $10 million with a major, global financial services organization, and the company grew its workforce by approximately 60 percent worldwide.

"Yes, 2016 was a very good year for us. Looking ahead to 2017, we fully expect to continue at the same pace. The demand for integrated platforms like ours is rising because CISOs want to consolidate the tools they use under centralized management,”’ said Skybox CEO Gidi Cohen.

“They're also desperate for better visibility of their attack surface and greater insight into what is truly putting their organization at risk -- especially as companies migrate to new technologies like virtual and cloud networks," added Cohen.

Cohen also emphasized that the threat landscape has changed, and those changes will significantly impact security in 2017 and beyond.

"Over the last few years, cybercrime has evolved from separate efforts of threat actors to a full-blown industry whereby exploit kits that take advantage of existing vulnerabilities are packaged, sold and re-sold," he explained.

This commercialization is making it easier than ever for criminals to attack organizations...and do it faster. To keep up, security professionals will have to change their thinking and processes around vulnerability management. The "let's patch everything we can" approach is not only irrelevant in 2017, it's impossible.

A more effective approach is to be selective in fixing vulnerabilities that pose an "imminent" threat (vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited in the wild) followed by those that are "potential" threats (existing and exploitable vulnerabilities in an organization's environment).

In addition, security solutions that make use of technologies like network modelling and attack vector analytics can provide insights about imminent and potential threats.

Armed with this expanded understanding of their attack surface, CISOs can better direct resources, responding quickly and accurately to the threats that put their organization most at risk.